Oracle Ties In-Memory JDE Enhancement to Own Hardware

April 15, 2014 Alex Woodie

Oracle unveiled a new in-memory Planning Advisor last week that’s designed to help JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers get a centralized view of their orders and their supply chains’ capability to fulfill them. The new software has been optimized to run on Oracle’s “Engineered Systems,” such as Exalogic and Exadata, and likely doesn’t run on IBM Power Systems.

To ensure demand is met, material planners and buyers need to bring together all sorts of data, including current inventory levels, demand information, and other pieces of information. JD Edwards shops, like the users of any ERP or MRP system, often string together a host of application and business intelligence systems with the hopes of having enough good information to make well-informed business decisions.

Oracle says its new In-Memory Planning Advisor software can do the work of many of these systems, and do so in real-time. The software consists of two primary components, the Planning Advisor Summary and the Planning Advisor Console, that combine existing functionality of two existing EnterpriseOne products, including the Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) and Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP).

The Planning Advisor Summary allows planners to view summary information about their items, including current inventory on hand, days until first receipt, safety stock, and lead time, the company says. Meanwhile, the new In-Memory Planning Advisor Console helps planners react to changing business conditions by determining how certain decisions, such as increasing quantities or canceling supply, will impact the supply.

The software is “specifically built and optimized for extreme performance on Oracle Engineered Systems,” Oracle says. This includes the Exadata Database Machine, Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and the SuperCluster. It’s unclear if this means the software won’t work on other systems where EnterpriseOne is supported, such as IBM Power Systems line of servers. Oracle did not fully answer IT Jungle‘s questions about what servers are supported by the new in-memory applications prior to this newsletter’s deadline.

If it doesn’t run on the IBM i server (or a Dell or Hewlett-Packard server, for that matter), it wouldn’t be the first time that Oracle has snubbed a competitor’s platform in favor of its own when it comes to enterprise software applications. You will remember that Oracle ceased sales of Blue Stack software components needed to run JDE on IBM hardware. The tools–such as DB2 and WebSphere–of course remained available from IBM. And Oracle is still supporting its customers’ JDE EnterpriseOne environments running on the “Blue Stack,” (so-called because it uses IBM middleware and operating systems and IBM hardware) at least until September 30, 2016, at which point it will cease providing technical support on IBM operating systems, databases, and middleware.

Regardless of where it runs, the move to in-memory processing is sure to provide a big boost in the speed and overall capabilities of supply and demand planning. The software will allow customers to “transform their supply planning by providing unparalleled visibility into the key components of the planning process,” says Lyle Ekdahl, senior vice president and general manager, JD Edwards at Oracle. “This enables organizations to make faster, better decisions that positively impact their bottom line.”